Doctoral thesis
Title:THE TRANSPARENCY OF THE FLUID PLANE
Subtitle: APPEARANCE AND SYSTEMS IN CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE
Author: Ricardo Guasch
The director: Txatxo Sabater
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
SUMMARY
Sensitive approach to formative codes of contemporary architecture, using an effective theoretical instrument: the notion of transparency, which has been a vehicle for critical analysis throughout the 20th century and to the present day.
The central theme of this thesis deals with the notion of transparency in modern architecture and its derivatives: the vibration of light, phenomenology of perception, suspension of the sign, and material transformation. All of these guide our way of comprehending architecture in the last two decades and also, to some extent, the field of art and design, with which it interacts.
The different meanings of the notion of transparency converge in the opposition between crystalline transparency or ‘crystalplane’, typical of the strict modernity, and the flowing image or 'fluid plane' that new strategies for characterization and differentiation are enriched.
Structure of the work
PART I. OBJECTIVITY
- Dematerialization and two-dimensional record. The reference of the plane starts in a progressive dematerialization that leads to the dismemberment of the architectural corpus tradition at the start of the 20th century.
- Transparent Organization of forms. Reflections; Rowe’s phenomenal transparency, and other 'derivatives'.
- Light and transformation. Review of the 'heterodox' Chareau’s Maison de Verre, today’s model of the new architecture.
PART II. DIFFERENTIATION
- New sensitivity. In contrast to the air space of modernity, now a conceptual change to a 'dense' space, that uses as its metaphor, the cloud, the chrysalis, and the veil.
- Japan. This sensibility is in the Japanese tradition of enigmatic shades and illuminated darkness.
- Flowing Image. As opposed to the crystal transparency, now a conceptual change to the transparency of the fluid or cosmic plane. Manet vs Monet.
- Events of light. The flow image finds its best reflection in the vibrations of light. The experience of light’s phenomena in nature from a 'moderate empiricism'.
- Qualities of light. Contrast between the direct experience in search of light events of architectural character, and the work of some artists and architects: Turrell, Flavin, Rothko, Libeskind, Zumthor, and others.
- The visible vs. the invisible. Phenomenology of perception and phenomenology in architecture. The essence of material, memory and place.
- The textures of another side. Confrontation and corrosion of the signs assigned to the material. Recycling and vibration of the luminous.
- Optical coverings. Given its exposure to light, the matter in transformation becomes an optical interface. It joins the technologies of environmental control, and structure.
ADDENDA
- Appearance and system. The entire building understood as matter in transformation implies a reflection about the genesis of form, autosimilarity, structures of minimal energy, and the intimate implication of structure in form.
EPILOGUE
- Sensitive and metaphorical record of materials and systems. Verification of the content expressed in the present work, and its connection to the notion of transparency, by means of experimental execution of model interfaces in which light and matter interact.